DREAM:
I have my period and had just changed my napkin in the bathroom. Everything was normal except the ‘blood’ was a yellow-brown colour, and had 3 thin strips of what I assumed to be sloughed off uterine tissue on it, but lying crosswise and pretty much parallel to each other. I folded it up and put it in a garbage can outside, and tried to wedge it under something else so it wouldn’t open up.
I was amongst a moving group of adults but I can’t remember where we were going. A woman in her fifties with grey hair and glasses said that her food (a sandwich? in a ball shape and inside a string bag) smelled off, but a man (her husband?) said that she had just been to the dentist (meaning her smell and taste would be off). She appeared to give in but said to me, “If you don’t see me for ages and ages, come look for me.” – something like that – meaning if the food was indeed bad and she gets sick or dies. I said, “Ages and ages??!!! Please!”, meaning that she’s exaggerating, that it wouldn’t take that long.
DREAMWORK:
It occurs to me that this is another discharge dream (at least the first part) like the toilet dreams. So if the toilet dreams are about discharging everything that’s no longer of use to me – wastes – then this menstrual dream (I am a week from my next period) is about discharging what’s no longer useful from my womb – actually ‘shit’ from my womb – the centre of my creative and regenerative power, my connection to the Great Feminine.
I sense that it was some residue from my past of hatred and resentment for the masculine as well as the feminine (which on the physical level manifested as cysts and fibroid, amongst other things). For the first time in my adult life I can say honestly that I do not hate men nor resent being a woman anymore. The world isn’t mended yet where all of that’s concerned, but I can see and feel it now as what needs to be healed, not what needs to be hated, scorned, and rejected.
Ought I to understand what the 3 strips meant? Yes. They were ‘fallouts’ of a natural process, as with menstruation when the egg causes the uterus to swell and thicken into a ‘nest’ in the event fertilization occurs, a fetus can readily feel at home in it. When time is up and there is no fertilization, the uterus sheds the now ‘extra’ tissue of the nest – skin, blood, cells – and discharges it as menses. It signifies the potential of the feminine to create, that all of us, even men, carry within us the archetypal energy of creation. I digress...
3 pieces of nearly identical and parallel ‘fallouts’ from the seat of my creativity... something (or 3 things) that didn’t get ‘fertilized’ into being that has to do with my creativity... Are these potentials I knew about? Yes. Writing is one. Calligraphy is another (this one just dropped into my mind as if from nowhere). Singing is the last one. These are things I’ve always loved doing or felt very drawn to, though there are many others that I feel the same way about, these ones are different in the sense that I feel a certain level of confidence – an I CAN feeling, even though I don’t believe I am great at any of them. (I’m only starting to write again; I haven’t done calligraphy for decades; and my singing voice is reedy and untrained, yada yada...) There’s a kind of uplifting energy, instead of a shrinking back that I am more prone to. They are nearly identical ‘strips’ because they are all ways I can express my creativity, but why parallel? Because they can be manifested concurrently... I am getting a twitch that there’s more to the singing... it’s a specific kind of singing... it’s poetry that is sung (funny how I just came across the book title “Song Yet Sung” by James McBride this morning), like Rumi’s. Now I am beginning to feel a bit intimidated... like this is all too much too big for my little self to accomplish in one lifetime.
Writing, calligraphy, and sung poetry seem to converge as an image of devotional life to me, not something I feel I know much about from the inside, but has a lot of appeal as well as a certain amount of mystery, and needless to say, trepidation. My creativity is to manifest as a devotional way of life. This feels like such a huge revelation to me, yet so familiar, all the pieces had already attracted my attention deeply and recurrently for most of my life, and only just now come together into one piece. I cannot see the entire picture of it yet, but feel the possibility of it very strongly in my blood, especially in my arms and legs.
I suppose my lack of confidence in myself to manifest these things is why I tried to hide (deny) their evidence in the garbage can in the dream.
Is it for me then, to ask my ancestors for help with recovering my selfhood at the upcoming Ghost Dance? A very clear and strong YES.
Next part: I am with the collective on the journey of life, we are all going in the same direction. The woman is my shadow, in the guise of someone a bit older, informed, and conservative. She suspects what she’s about to eat – to take in – is rotten, a potential poison to her wellbeing. When in fact, the doubt and suspicion are the poison to my wellbeing, hidden in my shadow and presented (or misrepresented) to me as a reliable, wiser, learned (because she’s older) source. The voice of authority and concern and “this is for your own good”. But my masculine pointed out the cause, the distorted sensory perception due to the effect of anesthesia. Your senses are numbed as well as the pain. So whatever I was killing (and avoiding) pain for, is throwing off my ability to discern and judge what’s danger and what’s not.
What is that that I fear the pain of, that I’ve shoved down into the shadow? Aging, is the answer that comes to me, another surprise. I am afraid of aging, of confronting the negative images of aging. I have to admit now to myself, that this is so, and I don’t like it. I know there are many wonderful things about getting older, as I can attest to myself, but my ego is not convinced that slowly falling apart is a ‘good’ thing. Just a couple of days ago I was telling Michael about how I feel sad seeing old people standing as if totally lost for a long time in the aisles of Loblaws, so lost they can’t even ask a question, their mouths hanging open and eyes huge like an animal frozen in headlights. And that I want to be dead before that happens to me.
Do they still enjoy life when they’re like that? Is there enough left in there to register much? I don’t know. My grandfather who will be 98 this year has always been terrified that he will lose his mental faculties this way, yet he is afraid of death, of dying alone. Clearly I have this fear of my mortality too, even though I would swear to anyone that I do not. I would say, as many would, that I am afraid of the pain and suffering leading up to death, but not of death itself. But even if I could be assured of a quick, painless death, would I meet it with perfect aplomb when it comes? I’m not so sure now... What is it that we are afraid of about death exactly? Perhaps it is the ‘untethering’ of everything that we know as ourselves from our body, the only one that we know, to be freed, yes, but also cast out into a great unknown, like an astronaut whose line with the mothership has snapped.
We are, at least I am, afraid to be totally lost, and disconnected, like those old people I saw, from the Life that has given birth to me, nurtured me, and supported me all of my life. To go to what? And where? What if there isn’t a loving warm white light to welcome me after I cross over? What if there is just a big NOTHING, and I am forever cut loose, on my own, in an eternal lifeless and deathless existence, looking forward only to insanity?? Nihilism, at any age is not cool.
Whew. This is another piece I need help from my ancestors with, emergent exactly 2 weeks before the Ghost Dance, a ceremonial dance to honour our ancestors, roots and traditions, to re-member as a way of healing and becoming more whole as human beings, as people in community.
But what’s with the ball shaped food in a string bag? The word that popped up when I dropped the image into my body is ‘bolus’. According to the Encyclopedia Britannia Online, a bolus is food that has been chewed and mixed in the mouth with saliva. The term bolus applies to this mixture of food and solutions until they are passed into the stomach.
So pre-chewed and partially digested food, the kind that animal mothers sometimes give to their babies. This food, to me, is truth. Food that is already partially broken down so it’s easier for me to assimilate. It is complex food made simpler, but because it seems so simple I suspected it as good for me. As I recall now, the string bag was suspended as if in mid-air, as if from heaven. I see, manna from heaven. Simple, nutritious, easily digestible food from heaven. Wholesome, and freely given. Always enough and not more. I am being provided for, yet I do not trust what I am given.
“ages and ages”... was that pointing to the ‘aging’ issue I didn’t know I have, or something more?
It has to do with what I stuffed into my shadow, again. Aging, and death. More specifically, the mortal fear of death. I’ll go back up to the paragraph which ended with my grandfather’s fear of death... Have to revisit that point, because I see now that I’ve squirmed my way out of facing that again, as I’ve always done... probably why my shadow in the dream told me to come look for her if she disappears, that is, if I deny her existence again. I scoffed at her seeming exaggeration, because I have been paying active attention to this work, the shadow material in me that need healing, and I will not let myself off the hook if I can help it, not for long anyway.
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